In the Tall Grass (2019)

Vincenzo Natali's adaptation of the Stephen King and Joe Hill novella arrives with a premise of admirable economy: a field of grass, a crying child, and a pregnant woman who walks in and cannot walk out. What follows is a time loop, a rock with opinions, and Patrick Wilson doing his level best to make horticulture menacing. The film is a genre exercise in the purest sense, and for the purposes of this ledger that purity is the whole story. There is almost nothing here to classify beyond the obvious.

The cast is led by Laysla De Oliveira, a Brazilian-Canadian performer, and the ensemble is modestly varied. Their presence carries no argument, no commentary, no thesis. The film casts people and lets the grass consume them. That registers as a faint pulse on the representation dial and nothing further. Race is never raised as a subject, and the film shows no interest in making it one. The malevolent field is not a stand-in for ecological collapse. It is a malevolent field. No corporation is indicted. No economic order is interrogated. The grass has no politics, which is its most endearing quality.

Becky's pregnancy is the film's one recurring idea. She is carrying a child she intends to place with adoptive parents, and the loop keeps dragging her back toward a decision to keep it. The narrative grants her a measure of agency, though the arc bends toward a moral about motherhood instead of any critique of the structures around her. Her body is treated as a site of horror, roots and seeds and dread, which places the film at a comfortable distance from any affirmative posture toward bodies. The remaining categories sit empty. No LGBTQ characters, no neurodivergent figures, no historical record to rewrite, no speeches to deliver, no sermon at the end. A film like this reminds us that most movies are not arguments. They are contraptions. This one is a contraption about grass, and it makes no apology for that.